It’s a great thing to have all these ancient Faith and Freedom issues online. With every click there is a treasure. Here is a nice piece, very short, by F.A. Harper in which he directly addresses this idea that the state is ever more necessary the more evil a people are. From January 1955:
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Do you enjoy riddles? This one challenges many students of liberty. Once we see the problem, lack of a solution will bedevil us until we can solve it logically to the satisfaction of our own conscience.
We want to answer this question: To what extent should politicians be enthroned to rule affairs in our daily lives? What should be the proper domain of political rulership-that is, government?
It would seem at first glance that the principle by which many answer is simple and easy to grasp: “People should be ruled only to the extent they are evil.” That is, they say, only evil acts should be restrained; good acts should be unrestrained, for men should be free to engage in all that is good. Seemingly easy, isn’t it?
But we should ask the next logical question: What precisely is good and what is evil? Only after we answer that will the political domain have been staked out• with markers we can really see, should we accept the above seemingly simple guide. But that is not the question I want to pose here. I want, instead, to focus attention on a political paradox in the preceding question, for which an answer seemed so simple.
The Riddle
To see the paradox clearly, let us look at good and evil in their pure forms, as a chemist deals with elements before he deals with complex compounds. Let us first look at a society that is wholly good, and then at one that is wholly evil.
A society of wholly good men calls for no political rulership whatsoever. For there surely is no need of ruling men who are made in the complete image of God, as all of these would be. Political rulership has no tenure of office in Heaven. Since evil acts wouldn’t exist in such a society, control by government is neither called for nor proper. No man should control any other man to• any extent. All would enjoy complete freedom, unrestrained. Only in another society where evil has entered the scene is any government deemed necessary, by this simple theory that government is.a necessary evil to cope with the evil in man.
Where, How, and Why?
Now consider as the other extreme a society in which every man is wholly evil. Still using the same principle that political rulership should be employed to the extent of the evil in man, we would then have a society in which complete political rulership of all the affairs of everybody would be called for: a totalitarian dictatorship in the extreme.
One man would rule all. But who would serve as the dictator? However he were to be selected and affixed to the political throne, he would surely be a totally evil person since all men are evil. And this society would then be ruled by a totally evil dictator possessed of unlimited political power. And how, in the name of logic, could anything short of total evil be its consequence? How could it be any better than having no political rulership at all in that society?
Here we see the political paradox I would pose: When society is viewed in terms of the two pure patterns in a moral sense-good and evil-we find that political rulership becomes either totally unnecessary or totally ineffective.
As people in society progress toward “good,” government becomes less and less necessary. As people in society progress toward “evil,” government becomes less and less effective.
Then at what point does government become most necessary and most effective? Why at this point and no other? Does it make sense to say that when good and evil are compounded in society, political rulership comes to attain a virtue denied to it otherwise? Can one man make another man good by force at some precise point of a mixture of good and evil? At what precise point? How and why?
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Although not as eloquent, I published my own thoughts on the necessity of government in human society. Basically, I believe that humans will gravitate towards a governed society during crises (and, originally, these crises can be relatively small and local).
This is similar to the question of the utopian goal of equality of happiness. A socialist might first say, “Yes, no one should have a greater claim to happiness than anyone else.” Then you say, “I guess we should let poor rapists rape greedy rich girls then, right?” It becomes clear that the only desirable form of equality is equality of freedom and justice.
For Leftists, all evil is mass evil — “systemic,” “institutional” evil — against which only they stand. Just look at how over these past decades American racism has contracted in practice (largely because of the revolt against government-imposed segregation) but exploded in Leftist theory. The “rape culture” has also become a “racist society.” It’s gone from bigotry being the province of an Archie Bunker to this being a nation of Archie Bunkers — and worse. Contemporary America is routinely described by such figures as Julianne Malveaux (“two hundred million white racists”), Joe Faegin (“every major aspect of life [here] is shaped … by racist realities”), and Maulana Karenga (“increasing racism and continuing commitment to white supremacy”) in terms honestly applicable to only apartheid or Nazism. But it’s a progression not without its own logic: The greater the evil of the social masses, the greater the good of the socialist elite….
Even the economic inequality of the market substantiates the moral superiority of the Left, since the latter is the singular good that will vanquish the evil of the former. “Greed,” like rape and racism, is judged yet another evil spreading throughout society. And the greater the evil of the social masses, the greater the need for the good of the socialist elite. “What you need,” reveals Catharine MacKinnon, “is people who see through literature [!] like Andrea Dworkin, who see through law like me, to see through art and create the uncompromised women’s visual vocabulary.” While the Left condemns the free market for a division of labor based on ability and the alleged concoction of “false needs,” its own politics centers on the dire need of the endarkened masses for axiological experts.
It is precisely the mechanics of this moral elitism that produces a superstructure of political elitism, the coercive rule of self-appointed experts, which is what every socialist government to date has been. What the Left has always condemned “capitalism” for most profoundly is its legal egalitarianism, its “formal equality” — that is, its granting of political equality to moral unequals. In such a society, a Catharine MacKinnon has no more power than anyone else to censor others. Would-be Lenins and Maos and Castros are reduced to the Man on the Street. Each citizen controls his own property, and no cete of socialists is authorized to redistribute that wealth according to any scheme.
The equality of political liberty is the fundamental evil the Left opposes — and the foremost evil the Left seeks to abolish.
FROM Requiem for the Left
Jeffery,
Your basic concept of government is wrong and that leads you to your logical difficulty.
Government is necessary in both good and bad societies if it is defined as an arbiter. If people are allowed to enter into willing exchanges where both parties agree and so are better off, government could be necessary to settle disputes over contracts and established units of measure. This is true whether the society is totally good or totally bad.
In a totally good society the two parties can have an honest misunderstanding of a contract and a third uninterested party may be necessary to settle the misunderstanding. A misunderstanding does not mean a person is good or bad only that there is a difference of opinion. The third party will be a government in some form.
The same conditions exists in a totally evil society. Both parties to the exchange will be attempting to cheat the other but exchange will only take place when each is satisfied that the exchange is a benefit. Later one, or both, may challenge the exchange to gain an advantage. At this point there is once again a need for a third party to settle the dispute. Now this third party will be made up of evil men, but if the society is open and limited to setteling only this dispute, neither transactor can gain an advantage because in an open society even bad people will not allow someone to gain an unfair advantage because they will suffer. There will be no advantage for those in government and so the contract will be decided on the merits of the contract.
Where government runs into a problem is when its powers are extended beyond settling disagreements over contracts or units of measure. When the government gains additional power to favor one party over the other you introduce basic unfairness in both a good and an evil society.
In a society of all good men the government will attempt to favor one party over the other for the good of the whole, but because there can be errors even with good intentions that lead to a decision that is harmful due to bias. Likewise in an evil society the ability of the government to favor one party over the other will lead to rampant corruption.
Our Founding Fathers understood this and attempted through the tool of the constitution to limit the government favoring one party over another, but today we have distorted the constitution to such a point that even with good people there is error. The only way to have a fair society and good government is to limit government to a third party impartial role.
Dick: Jeffrey didn’t write that.
So how do we define good and evil? Do we care what another man’s vices are so long as he does not harm an unwilling participant?
What kind of person would like to exercise dominion over other people? Is that a good definition of evil–the ambition to rule over unwilling subjects?
Perhaps this article has it all inverted. Maybe a good society is one where no person aspires to rule and an evil society is one with an absolute despot. The gradations of evil would be a continuum of governance ranging from no ruler to tyranny.
By such a definition, a society of evil individuals would all desire to rule and therefore would all compete with one another to gain ascendancy. This Hobbsian nightmare would not be the result of no government, but of the universal desire to govern.
If such an evil society was composed of violent citizens, it would be a “might makes right” bloodbath. If such an evil society was composed of more cooperative citizens, it would be called a DEMOCRACY.
Dick Fox,
Your assertion that government’s ideal role of ‘arbiter’ was that envisioned by the framers of the US constitution, seems far-fetched to me.
A set of people who wanted to create an umpire, would not have had the conceit to speak on behalf of “the people” – and would certainly not have then sought to impose the usual, monopolistic, aggressive, structure that all political parasites crave the moment they have a chance at the throne.
The framers – for the most part – only had a problem with the existence of a coercive institutional setup, when they themselves were its victims: the moment they became perpetrators (e.g., Washington during Shays’ Rebellion, Sam Adams declaring any dissenter should be hanged) they quickly reverted to the behaviour typical of the tax-eating class.
(Note: I would dearly love to exclude Paine from this tirade, but although he was a proto-anarchist he simply did not trust humans to be as enlightened as he was… likewise Jefferson had some lofty catchphrases about swearing eternal hostility to tyranny, and trees of liberty being nourished by the blood of tyrants…. but he kept his slaves).
The devil take the lot of ‘em, and put hagiography in the bin. They had the same intellectual conceit as the likes of Leo Strauss: they considered themselves to be part of some natural class of intellectually and morally superior person and somehow that entitled them to (a) speak on behalf of every man, woman and child in the area; and (b) live in a palace at the expense of the aforementioned men, women and children.
The difference between Jefferson (yea verily, even Jefferson) and vile scum like Sarkozy and Blair, is that Jefferson was a gifted rhetoretician whose prose did not sound like it was written by a bad soap opera scriptwriter.
To paraphrase Didierot: man will be free when the last politician is bludgeoned to death with the severed arm of the last police sniper.
Cheerio
GT
Oh – and one thing I forgot to mention: disagreements regarding contractual terms do not require government to arbitrate – it is easy to envisage a functioning private market for ‘justice’ (people like Stefan Molyneux has written copiously on such a system).
In fact (and in theory) the existence of a monopoly would be expected to reduce output, make it more costly per unit, less efficient, and of lower quality. So the low quality of legal system we observe should never be a shock to anyone.
Tyranni delendia sunt.
Cheerio
GT
Damn it… fat finger error.
Tyranni delendi sunt.
Takes all the zing out of it when you have to correct it for typos.
Tyranny is certainly a bigger threat than Carthage.
Mr. Fox,
Let me recommend two books to you: For a New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard and The Market for Liberty by Linda & Morris Tannehill. Both books explain how arbitration can be supplied without a state monopoly.
Cheers,
Alex Peak
I would argue the proto-state evolved from the Hobbesian social contract: the weak would be too weak and get killed to live in a world of true freedom so they gave up their freedom to the strong in exchange of security and a chance of having a life. It could be argued that states need not exist if people kept forming militias and deposing every despot yet it never happens. People have been saying Robert Magube won’t long for over ten years. In reality, Mugabe will die of old age in luxury.
Maybe it’s a fact of life there are evil-doers who are powerful enough to rule and can’t be able to deposed and the people hope the next ruler is considerably more caring or more weak. Such rulers aren’t going to play nice hence there will never be a ‘right’ system (including ‘anarcho-Capitalism’). They aren’t going to listen quaint ‘private arbitrators’.
GT, the revolting colonials didn’t even have a pause before perpetrating tyranny themselves. They were doing unto the Loyalists from the get go.
Of Paine, the most charitable thing that can be said is the Irishism “deep down he was shallow”. He was more than willing to throw wide the gates for revolutionary terror to come through, saying of Louis XVI (for instance) that he only wished to destroy him as a figure but not as a person – blithely unaware that with the figurative comes the literal, as history had already amply proved with the likes of Charles I. I once heard the republican Thomas Keneally talk in much the same terms with respect to Australia, and when I pointed out how Paine had anticipated his contrast of the figure and the person of the monarch, and what had actually come to pass, he just laughed.
BTW, how does a fat finger reach both “i” and “a”, even on a French keyboard?
Alex,
There is no need for a state monopoly but the function of arbitration does require a governmental unit.
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